1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates an article carrying a quite thin-model thin film integrated circuit that functions as a memory, a microprocessor (a central processing part, a CPU, or a MPU), or the like. The article includes, for example, an ID label, an ID tag, and an ID card, mainly for identifying human beings, animals and plants, commercial products, and the like.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, in all kinds of industrial worlds such as food industry, manufacturing industry, or the like, calls have been heightened for strengthening safety and management systems of commercial products, and therewith, the amount of information on the commercial products are increasing. However, the current information on a commercial product is just information such as a country of manufacture, a manufacturer, an item number, or the like, mainly provided by ten and several figures of a bar cord, and the mount of information is quite small. Further, in the case of using a bar-code, carrying out by hand item by item makes reading of the bar-code require long time. Consequently, instead of the bar-code system, an automatic recognition technique by a non-contact IC tag utilizing an electromagnetic wave, referred to as RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), has been attracting attention.
In addition, in order to ensure safety (for example, a place of origin, or whether infected with an infectious disease or not) of animals and plants, a system is becoming common, in which IC chips are directly implanted into bodies of the animals and plants to obtain and manage information on the animals and plants by an information reading device (reader) outside the bodies.
In addition, the number of cards being carried per person has been recently growing, and above all, a non-contact IC card communicating by utilizing electromagnetic field is becoming common, for example, in forms of electronic money and electronic tickets (refer to Non-Patent Document 1).
(Non-Patent Reference 1) Nikkei Electronics (Nikkei Business Publications, Inc.) published on Nov. 18, 2002, pp. 67-76